by Stuart Woods
As the door closed behind her there was an audible pause in the conversation as people glanced her way, then a resumption as they pretended not to see her. In a trice she had located the Walter Cronkites, the Mike Wallaces, the Abe Rosenthals, and the Richard Clurmans, all friends of Norman Barton’s, who was rumored to be in line for the executive editorship of the Times when the present occupant of that office retired. She headed toward the honoree, giving a happy wave and a smile to acquaintances along the way.
Norman was standing in the back room, surrounded by friends and admirers, autographing copies of his book. After only a brief pause, Amanda strode forward, and the others gave way like yachts before the Queen Mary. “ Norman! How exciting this must be for you!” Someone from the publishing house handed her a book. “I can’t wait to read every page!”
“Amanda!” Barton cried, touching his cheek to each of hers. “I’m so pleased you got back in time!”
“Oh, I got back early this morning,” she replied.
“I didn’t know the airlines arrived from the islands at that hour,” someone said.
Amanda turned her gaze on a short, plump woman who collected gossip items for a news syndicate. “One doesn’t always fly the airlines, dear,” she replied sweetly. “Sometimes one’s friends provide.”
“Oh, a private jet,” the woman cried. “You landed at Teterboro?” Obviously looking for something she could check.
“No,” Amanda replied dismissively, then reached forward, took Barton’s elbow, and deftly plucked him out of the group as a cow pony cuts a steer from the herd, and, by her proximity to the honoree, placed herself at the center of the party.
They chatted enthusiastically for a moment, and then, as Amanda had planned, people began to approach, greeting them both, complimenting Amanda on her tan, asking about her holiday.
“Did you try that new little restaurant?” a rival columnist asked cattily.
“Oh, my dear, no,” Amanda sighed. “All I did was work. I got up every morning, played the tennis ball machine for half an hour, worked for three hours, had lunch at the pool, then worked another three hours. The staff cooked every bite I ate.”
“And what work kept you so occupied?” the woman asked.
“Why, I finished my book, darling,” Amanda sang back. “It goes to my publisher’s tomorrow!”
The woman blinked. “Congratulations,” she said, then disappeared.
Amanda worked the crowd for an hour, then, at the moment when the tide seemed to turn toward dinner, she made her good-byes and headed toward the door, nearly colliding with Bill Eggers.
“Oh, Bill,” Amanda said, “you are just the man I want to see. Come with me, you’re taking me to dinner.” She hustled him to her car.
“Good thing I didn’t have plans,” Eggers said.
“I’d have kidnapped you anyway,” Amanda said, sliding her arm through his. “Paul, we’re going to Elaine’s.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Paul replied.
“I see you got the car,” Eggers said, looking around admiringly.
“Of course I did, darling,” Amanda giggled.
“I don’t think Dick Hickock knew what hit him.”
“Of course not, darling.” She made small talk all the way to Elaine’s, while simultaneously formulating her next move.
Chapter 6
Amanda swept into Elaine’s, automatically casting an eye about for who was there and where they were seated. Elaine herself was way in the back of the restaurant, seated at a customer’s table. She lifted an eyebrow and Jack, the headwaiter, seated Amanda and her lawyer at a favored table up front. Amanda was just as happy not to have been greeted by Elaine, who she found hard to read, never quite sure whether she was being insulted. She came to the restaurant only for her work; before they were seated she had three items for tomorrow’s column.
Bill Eggers ordered a double Jack Daniel’s on the rocks, and Amanda ordered a large bottle of San Pellegrino mineral water. She always kept her wits about her, relaxing enough to drink alcohol only when she was among trusted friends in her home or theirs. They chatted idly as they selected from the menu and ate two courses. Only when they had both declined dessert and received their coffee did Amanda choose to begin.
“Bill, you must know about this scandal sheet that was circulated to a lot of fax machines this afternoon.”
“I believe I caught a whiff of it.”
“Well put; it was all so much dung.”
“Certainly was, Amanda. I mean, I would have known if you weren’t in Saint Bart’s.”
“Of course, darling.” She paused for effect. “I want to hire a private detective; I’d like you to recommend one.”
The lawyer’s nose wrinkled. “Is it that important to know who sent the fax?”
Amanda gazed across the room. “It might become that important; if so, I intend to be ready.”
“Amanda, let me give you my lecture, the short version, on private detectives.”
“All right, Bill; I’m listening.”
“I suppose I’ve dealt with a couple of dozen of them in one way or another over the past twenty-five years, and I haven’t found one yet who could be trusted to keep a confidence.” He held up a hand before she could reply. “I’m not saying there are not ethical private eyes out there; it’s just that I’ve never run across one. They tend to be failed cops whose ethics were too ripe for the police force – and that’s very ripe indeed. They dress badly, smell awful, and drink in the morning; they charge you by the day, then spend half the day at the track; they charge you for information, then make you pay them not to reveal it to others.”
“This is the short version?”
“All right, I’ve said it, and having said it, I have a much better idea.”
“I can’t wait to hear it.”
“Does the name Stone Barrington ring a bell?”
Amanda wrinkled her brow before she caught herself. “That police detective who was involved in the investigation of the Sasha Nijinsky disappearance four or five years ago?”
“Your memory always astonishes me.”
“It’s not that good; tell me about him. The long version, past and present.”
“Born somewhere in New England to a mill-owning family who went bust during the thirties; father dropped out of Harvard to become a carpenter and a political leftist in Greenwich Village, thus becoming the black sheep; mother was Matilda Stone…”
“The painter?”
“Right. Stone went to law school, but during his senior year he hung out with some cops and became besotted with their profession. When he graduated, he didn’t take the bar; instead, he went to the police academy. He had made it as far as detective second grade over fourteen years – no better than average – when Sasha Nijinsky disappeared. He was practically on the scene when she vanished and thus caught the investigation. His theories didn’t square with the department’s – he had never really been one of the boys – so at the first opportunity they retired him for medical reasons. He had taken a bullet in the knee on an earlier investigation.”
“Was he crippled?”
“Not really; they were just looking for an excuse.”
“What has he done since?”
“For a while he spent his time restoring a Turtle Bay townhouse left to him by a great-aunt, until he ran out of money. Then he crammed for the bar examination and passed it well up on the list, top ten percent. I’d known him in law school; I took him to lunch and offered him a deal with us.”
“He joined Woodman and Weld?”
“Not exactly. He became of counsel to us, set up his own office at home, and began handling our client-related criminal cases and the occasional investigation.”
“Client-related criminal cases? I don’t understand; you don’t represent criminals, do you?”
“Typically, a valued client’s son involved in a date rape – that sort of thing.”
“I see. And what sort of investigations?”
�
�Again, client-related – divorce, adultery, runaway daughter, theft of company funds, industrial espionage – whatever comes up.”
“Is he good?”
“He combines a good policeman’s curiosity and tenacity with a good lawyer’s discretion and restraint. And he’s socially acceptable.”
“Then why don’t I know him?”
“He lives a quiet life, dates a lady judge; he’s better known in courtroom circles than in society.”
“Wasn’t there a lot of publicity about him over the Nijinsky case?”
“A great deal, but he went to ground very quickly, and the press forgot about him, not having any reason to remember.”
“He sounds good.”
“Why don’t you go and see him? I’ll be glad to make an appointment.”
“Bill, people usually come to see me.”
“It would perhaps be more discreet for you to go to him.”
“Make the appointment; I’ll go for tea tomorrow at four.”
“Tea?”
“Bill, if he can’t mount a decent tea, why would I want to know him?” Amanda looked up to see a television actor come into the restaurant with a woman who was not his wife. She made a mental note for the column.
Chapter 7
The young man stood behind the stone wall that separated Central Park from Fifth Avenue and watched the front door of the apartment building from across the street through a pair of pocket binoculars. It was just before 2:00 A.M., and a couple were being deposited at the curb by a hired limousine.
The night doorman got the car door, then rushed ahead to open the building door for them. The young man watched him see the couple onto the elevator, then return to the lobby. The doorman picked up a clipboard, made some sort of mark, probably next to the couple’s name, then tossed the clipboard onto a desk, tipped his uniform hat back on his head, stretched and yawned, then sat down at the desk and rested his head on his arms. He had obviously checked in the last people for the night – all present or accounted for – and now there would be no one to disturb his sleep until the early birds went for their jogs.
The young man waited for another twenty minutes, checking the doorman frequently through the binoculars; finally, the man was clearly deeply asleep. The young man set a paper bag on top of the wall, placed his hands on the wall, and vaulted lightly over it. He picked up the paper bag and crossed Fifth Avenue. Traffic was very light at this hour. He checked his watch: just past 2:30 A.M.
He approached the door of the building without stealth, as if he were about to enter, then stopped and again checked the doorman, who was still sleeping soundly. He looked at the lobby floor: marble. Then he stepped into the shadows beside the door of the building, shucked off his sneakers, pulled out a pair of soft leather-soled bedroom slippers, put them on, then put the sneakers into the bag. He couldn’t afford squeaking noises from rubber soles on the marble floor. He checked the doorman again, then walked silently across the lobby to the elevator, which he already knew was very quiet, and pressed the button for the fourteenth floor. The young man already knew a lot about the building and the apartment he was about to enter.
He stepped out of the elevator car and into a private vestibule. Only one apartment to a floor in this building. The door took nearly two minutes – a very good lock – and when he heard the bolt slide back he stopped, put away his lockpicks, took a stopwatch from his pocket, and pressed the start button. He had forty-five seconds, and he didn’t want to use more than thirty, if he could help it.
He opened the door, closed it behind him, and sprinted down a hall, across a large living room, and into the study. He knew that the occupants were away and that the maid’s room was all the way at the rear of the apartment, behind the kitchen. In the study, he opened a closet door, switched on the light, found the burglar alarm central control box, and fixed the stopwatch to it with a magnet glued to its back. Twelve seconds gone.
He opened the control box and began the process of disconnecting first the telephone line to the box, then the wire to the siren. This was necessary because he didn’t know the disarming code sequence. He looked at the watch; thirty-two seconds had passed. Not bad. The alarm would go off in thirteen seconds, and since he had done all he could, he would just have to wait and see what happened. At forty-five seconds there was an audible click and the sound of tone dialing from the central computer unit. No siren, and, since the telephone line had been disconnected, no phone call to the central security station of the alarm company. There was the possibility, though, that the disconnecting of the phone line had sent some sort of code to central security, so he would not dally.
The safe was conveniently located in the same closet as the alarm control box; he had examined it briefly on his previous visit. It was sturdy and electronically operated, requiring a four-digit code and a key to open the door. The key was absent, but the lock would not be a problem. He retrieved a small screwdriver from his tool kit and removed the battery access panel from the front of the safe, then took a palmtop computer from a jacket pocket. A wire attached to tiny alligator clips ran from the computer, and he attached the clips to the safe’s battery terminals. He had written a simple program for the computer that would start at the lowest possible four-digit number, then go to the highest possible four-digit number and back and forth until the safe clicked open. The process would be shortened by the fact that most of these electronic safe keypads would not allow the repetition of a number in the code, so there would be fewer codes to try. He had test-run the program, and he knew that it required nine minutes and eighteen seconds to try all the possible codes. He tapped the instructions into the small keyboard, and the program began to run. He set the computer on top of the alarm control panel and settled in to wait. Four minutes and nine seconds into the program, he heard a click from the safe, and the program stopped.
Quickly, in case there was a time limit, he picked the safe’s conventional lock, and the door swung open. Inside were two delightful surprises. The first was three thick stacks of one-hundred-dollar bills, with a rubber band around each, and another stack of fifties. The bills looked well used, and a cursory inspection revealed that the serial numbers were not consecutive. He estimated that they totaled approximately thirty-five thousand dollars, but this was no time to start counting; he stuffed them into one of his jacket’s large pockets. The other surprise in the safe was a small, nickel-plated automatic pistol, with, of all things, a silencer! He stuffed that into a pocket, then opened a jewelry box, which was full of a lot of junk that didn’t interest him, except for a Cartier watch with a gold bracelet. That he kept; he loved watches.
He had just closed the safe door and was putting away his equipment when from a distance he heard a noise like the front door opening, followed by voices. No time to reconnect the alarm system; he closed the cabinet door, switched off the light, and left the closet, closing the door behind him. While he was doing all this he wondered if he had somehow caused this to happen. His heart was racing; he loved it. The voices came closer, and he dove into the kneehole of the desk, pulling his knees up to squeeze in.
“We got a disconnect signal,” a voice said. The lights came on in the study. “If somebody cuts the phone line or disconnects it, we get a signal. Usually means a burglar has visited.”
“Do you really need a gun?” another voice asked, sounding nervous.
“There might be somebody in the apartment right now,” the other voice replied. “If there is, I’m going to be ready.”
The voices were muffled slightly, and the young man thought they were probably in the closet by now.
“See right here?” the first voice asked. “The phone line was disconnected.”
Time to go, the young man thought. He peered around the corner of the desk and saw the backs of the two men.
“He’s probably had a shot at the safe,” the first voice said. “Electronic job.”
The young man crawled quickly, silently toward the door of the study; in
doing so, he had to move past the closet. As he made the door, the first voice spoke again.
“You stay here,” the voice said, and there was the sound of the action of an automatic pistol being worked. “I’m going to have a look around. You might use the phone on the desk over there to call nine-one-one and tell them there’s been a break-in.”
“Right,” the other man replied.
The young man sprinted nearly soundlessly through the living room, his soft slippers making only tiny noises on the carpeting. He made it down the hall to the front door, opened it, and stepped into the hallway. The elevator and the front door seemed like a bad idea; if there was already a cop car on the block when the 911 call went in, he might meet them going out the door. The elevator door stood open. He stepped inside, pushed in the EMERGENCY button to activate the car, pressed the button for the ground floor, and stepped out of the car just as the doors closed. The elevator started down, and he made for the stairs. Holding his paper bag of tools, he bounded down flight after flight, past the lobby floor to the basement. There had to be a back door for service purposes.
He emerged into a dimly lit hallway that seemed to have a row of doors leading to storage rooms. He raced past them, made a turn at the end of the hallway, and came up against a door. He put his ear to it, and could hear the sound of a garbage truck outside. Carefully, he opened the door, and as he did, a loud bell began to ring. Coolly, he put his head out and looked around. He was in a sort of concrete pit, with steps leading up to the side street. He closed the door behind him, but the bell continued to ring, both inside and outside the building. Worse, a red light over his head was flashing relentlessly. Now he began to panic. He charged up the steps and ran head-on into a garbage collector holding two empty cans.
The two went down together, the garbage man hollering, the cans bouncing around the sidewalk.